ABSTRACT
The sad reality is that there is far more to ‘racism in football’ than the occasional utterance emanating from a poorly educated dullard on the terraces. There is little that can usefully be added to the various texts on this aspect of racism that have appeared over the past decade (see, for example, Garland and Rowe, 2000 and Power, 2000). These works have explored the phenomenon of fans’ racism; legislative approaches to it; club-based initiatives; and the work of Kick-It (see below), the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) and a host of other organisations that have an interest in the issue. This chapter seeks to adopt a different perspective. Its main emphasis is on racism in the boardroom and the changing room and the game’s (inadequate) response to it. The one point that might be worth making on the subject of fans’ racism is that the general opinion among stewards and the police seems to be that the most effective response is for other fans to turn round and say, ‘I’m not prepared to put up with that’. Understandably, relatively few supporters are willing to do so; it is far easier to leave such situations to the police, the stewards or someone (anyone!) else, but fans’ intervention is certainly a more effective response to racism than another dose of ill-penned legislation.
